This is Guero Valdez reporting
by Rokhal
Summary: An arrested fall off a bridge in a fight with LA's Ghost Rider left aspiring gangster Guero Valdez in a wheelchair, before he'd even graduated high school or gone to prison. Now he turns his intelligence and general nosiness in a new direction: investigating for the high school newspaper, The Hillrock Buzzard.
1. Vocation

Ramón Cordova got off the metro bus at 5:15 in the morning, hitched his lunch bag around his shoulder, and walked, slow, watchful, the seven blocks up the street from the bus stop to Canelo's Auto and Body. At six, Canelo would arrive to let him in. Until then, he would lean against the side of the building, watching the traffic, peering at the faces of the other early birds who passed by. He had his reading glasses and a book about child soldiers. Once he got inside, he would start the coffee machine. Then he would have his workstation, a parade of repairs and diagnostics of varying difficulty, his lunch, and hopefully no stupid interruptions.

He scanned the tags on the buildings as he walked, alert to new gang signs, changes in territory. The bus crossed through the territories of four different Sureño street gangs, including Ramón's first—Maravilla Lobos, which was nothing but children and strangers after twelve years' absence.

He wanted to keep an ear to the ground, but to really understand the shifting patchwork of invisible walls that divided East Los Angeles, he would have to be trusted, he would have to be back in it. So he walked the streets he'd grown up on deaf and half-blind, with only hints as to who the Black Hand might send to make an example of a notorious deserter like him.

Well. He could never have fought the way he had, for Maravilla and for the EME and for himself, if he'd ever planned on living long.

He reached the block beside the auto shop, the high spiked wrought-iron fence that surrounded the lot, and leaned against the wall of the insurance agency that faced it, watching. Marking the cars that passed up and down the two-lane, the commuters and old people walking in the chill of the morning. At last, Canelo's truck pulled in and unlocked the gate. Ramón waved to him, crossed the street, and followed him in. The rest of the morning shift filtered in over the ten minutes that followed, checked over the projects and messes left by the evening shift, and split off around the garage.

By noon, he'd finished a clutch job on a race-modified and much-abused '12 Civic, and started on one of the morning's drop-ins, a diagnostic on an '02 Ranger with a rough idle. Then it was time to break for lunch. It was always a bit dizzying, an illicit thrill, to be able to look at his own watch, walk over to the time clock, and punch out whenever he thought it appropriate. No bells. No orders.

He got his lunch out of his locker and waited for the microwave. The guy ahead of him, heavy-set, shorter than Ramón, gazed at his own meal, turned around idly, then jumped, eyes popping, and spun back around, canceled the microwave, and cleared it out. Ramón waited for him to clear out of the room, then put in his sour cream tub full of goat stew.

When it was heated, he gave it a stir and inhaled the steam critically. Little flat. He needed to brown the meat more. Next time he'd do better. He was a free man. He could make jalisco every week for the rest of his life if he wanted.

"Cordova," a man said from behind him, and Ramón straightened, set his stew safely on the microwave. He stopped himself; the next step would be to spin around, hands at his sides. He looked over his shoulder instead.

Canelo. His boss, half a head shorter than him but barrel-chested enough to give him trouble. Suspenders, arching mustache. If it weren't for Canelo, Ramón could never have found a job that paid his rent, could never have kept up his parole.

"Yes, sir?" he asked, making himself smaller.

"Message for you," Canelo said, waving a little yellow note.

Ramón took it with trepidation. "Thank-you, sir."

"That's all. Take your thirty, then we need you back on the floor."

Ramón nodded. He waited until Canelo had left, then he retrieved his stew. He left the break room so someone else could use it, and ate alone in the alley.

He read the note. It was not an estranged relative, a homie looking for backup that Ramón would no longer give, his parole officer, or a coded threat from the Black Hand. It read:

_Student reporter from Hillrock High requests to interview._ To R Cordova. From M Valdez. 11:03 AM. Please call back.

What. No. Ramón balled up the note and let it roll into the gutter.

He finished his day quietly. Replaced his equipment, folded up the drapes that protected his last customer's '98 Caddy from scratches, shot a warning look at the Reyes kid and received a challenging stare back—talk about more balls than brains, Reyes was half his size and too young to buy beer yet—and shrugged off Hernandez' attempts at "friendly" conversation—what was it like inside? Did you really? With a machete?—questions Ramón had never discussed with his lawyer, let alone some brainless cabrón from the auto shop.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, he was home kneading lard and masa for a new batch of tamales when someone knocked on the door.

The cat, who had been watching him from the top of the refrigerator, jumped across the kitchen, bounced off the counter, and disappeared into the house.

Ramón straightened, washed his hands, shook off his apron and folded it on the counter. In case he was about to be executed, he didn't want to die in a dirty apron with flour on his hands. He turned off the stove and dampened a towel to cover the masa, keep it from drying off or the house burning down in case he had to go down to the courthouse, or to talk some idiot out of shooting his neighbors. Then he approached the door, face-front, watching the windows. He angled himself away from the door and waved his left hand in front of the peephole, blocking off any light from within. No gunshots through the door. He looked. No one standing outside.

He had ordered some roast chiles from down south, and they ought to be coming by mail. But they would be a small package. Nothing a deliveryman would leave at his door. Perhaps a bomb.

It would take some genius to build a bomb that went off automatically when you looked at it, and anyway, there were easier ways to kill him. He opened the door slowly and stepped around to look.

There was a freckled young man in a wheelchair parked on his porch. "Mr. Cordova," he said. He had a sharp grin, narrow gray eyes. Wore a loose-fitting jersey and shorts, had a backpack strung onto the handles of his chair.

Ramón looked behind the kid at the low concrete steps leading to his porch. "What do you want."

"Martin Valdez," the kid said, raising one hand to shake. He had a coffin tattooed on his forearm, a pistol high on the inside of the opposite bicep. "Hillrock High Weekly Bulletin. Was hoping you could answer me a few questions."

The note. The message at the auto shop that he'd ignored. He stared down at the kid. Wondered how he'd found his house. Wondered how he'd gotten up the porch. Persistent fucker. "How'd you find my house."

"Asked around," said Martin, as if it were that simple.

"Answer the question."

The kid mouthed, _fuck you,_ but he said, "With respect, I'm not giving up my source." Then, "Got time for a short conversation, Ramón Cordova?"

"Who did you say you're with?"

"Hellrock Bulletin," the kid said. "Got a few? Or are you—" he cocked his head to peer behind Ramón's waist. "busy with anyone back there?"

"What's a school newspaper want with someone like me?" Ramón demanded, stepping cautiously out to the porch and shutting the door behind him. He swung his head from side to side, alert to any movement in the corners of his eyes. Traffic. Birds.

The kid shrugged. "With respect—you're news. People want to know. I've done the kiddie-work, published a series on hygiene in the cafeteria kitchen, but that don't make me my bones as a reporter."

"You're here for a grade?" Ramón stared down suspiciously at the coffin on the kid's right forearm.

"Grades? Feh," the kid said. "I'm here to publish. The whole varrio's scared of you, sabes? That how you want it? You can just step back, shut that door in my face. Or, you let me in, you get to tell your side of the story, I get my byline." He clicked his tongue, cocked fingerguns. "Up to you, Mr. Cordova."

Ramón stared down at the kid. This lanky, twitchy guero with death inked on his arms and a too-sharp smile and eyes that took in everything and met his stare when they'd finished. Kid had balls like small oranges. "Tell me how you found me and I'll think about it."

The kid's grin shrank, his lips went flat except where a scar pulled down the left side. His eyes flicked from side to side a moment, thinking. At last he said, "I'm no snitch. I tell you that, whole street knows my promises no valen una mierda."

Ramón opened the door, backed into the house. "Bueno. Ask your questions."

The kid's eyes widened for an instant before he recovered, made them sly and confident again. He shifted in his chair and wheeled himself over the front threshold with a jolt and a bang. Ramón turned his back slowly. Washed his hands again, put on his apron, and got back to kneading the masa while the cornhusks boiled.

"So you're Ramón Cordova, the same Ramón Cordova who lived around here in the summer of 2005, correct? For the record."

"Correct."

"You ran with the Maravilla Lobos back in the day?"

"Correct."

"Spent time in Atwater and Tehachapi Penitentiary, verdad?"

"That's public record."

"Si, si. Formalities. So I hear you were in it when Leyenda put that hole in Castillo Avenue last month. What exactly went down?"

Ramón rolled the masa up into a ball and thumped it on the counter, watched it crumble. Just about blended. "Couldn't tell you."

"You can't or you won't?"

"The Feds claim there was a mass release of hallucinogenic gas that night. So, no, I can't tell you what went down."

"What'd your eyes tell you?"

"I don't want you to put that in your paper, make people think I'm really a mad dog."

"But you were there?"

"Thought I could help out. Got my motorcycle blown up."

"So something did go down. Real enough to trash your ride."

"Correct. They still haven't fixed the hole. Next question." He took a pair of tongs and fished a cornhusk out of the boiling water.

"What're your thoughts on the Ghost Rider?" The kid's voice was oddly tense, the consonants hard and hissing.

He turned to look. The kid's head was cocked, his phone in his lap, hands clenching and releasing on the chair arms. "Who?"

"You know. The local luchador. Rides around on fire all night like he owns the place."

"La Leyenda? Needs to learn how to mind his own business."

"Heh-heh."

"Like you."

The kid sniffed. "So, back in the day. What was the Maravilla Lobos' beef with the Hillrock Treces?"

Ramón looked up from tying a freshly-filled cornhusk. "How do you know the Hillrock Treces?"

"I asked around."

"No. Tell me."

The kid flipped through photos on his phone. "Vacant buildings, aerial walls, you can still see the tags." He stopped at a photo, pinched over the screen and zoomed in. "Here, you can see the edges. Or this here, the Lobos just crossed 'em off, didn't bother with a fill-in. Like they're not worth the time. Owl, he's a street artist now, but when he was a kid, he was a tagger. He was tagging the same time the Kings were banging. He told me they had a feud with the Lobos, but didn't say why."

"You won't hear it from me, either. I don't know."

"How could you not know? You—you're El Perro—"

"I'm a man, not a dog," Ramón snapped. "I don't know because it wasn't my business to know. It won't do any good to know. I don't think any of the jefes knew what started it, or cared."

The kid flipped back through his phone, to a page of notes. "So. Mr. Cordova. I won't ask you for details about July in '05. But what happened in June?"

June, 2005. Suddenly Ramón felt the heat, and it wasn't from the steaming water. He sectioned off a new handful of masa, molded it into a neat rectangle in the center of a fresh cornhusk. "That was a bad time."

"How so?"

"Saw friends die. A lot of friends die. Marco, he got hit wandering where he shouldn't have. Treces killed him. It was a blow, he was a carnal, he did a lot of the organization, distribution, and such. I think he was in the Treces' territory for his little cousin's baptism, stayed too long. They killed him in the street. Almost to Lobos territory.

"So we set up a shrine. A man dies on the street, it's the decent thing to do. Funeral wasn't 'till next week. We set up a shrine, all the boys came and lit a candle, Treces kept an eye on us but didn't try anything. First night. Second night, more of us came. And Marco's wife. His son. The captains and the freshies. That second night, some Treces drove by with automatics. Tried to take out everyone at the shrine. Killed Marco's wife. Killed some kid who knew his son, who wasn't even in the life. Killed my brother, my sponsor. Grazed me in the neck."

"And there's no more Hillrock Treces," the kid finished.

"That's what I hear."

"You have anything to do with that?"

Ramón smacked the damn tamale, spattering masa all over the counter. "You did not ask me that question."

The kid watched him, hands low, smirk fading.

"You know the Treces, you talked to Owl, you found me. You know so much, you should know better than to talk about what should be left buried."

"All behind you. Put it in the past."

Ramón scooped up the masa and molded it back onto the cornhusk. "Your school paper, what're you writing about?"

"You, Mr. Cordova. People know you, they want to know more."

"Well, look around." He waved at his little house, the walls bare except for a crucifix and two faded, watermarked photographs squashed into a single cheap frame, that had survived seven years in a federal penitentiary. "Tell them what you see."

To his credit, the kid did look. He spun around to survey the living room. The second-hand coffee table half-sanded down, waiting to be refinished. The mismatched chairs—one folding, one wicker. The photograph of a young Ramón, almost unrecognizable, with his brother and parents, and another photograph, an inkjet print on yellowing paper, of a young woman with a baby.

"Seen better days."

"No." Ramón had never before been as self-determined, as capable, as he was today. He had never had command of his own space. He had run from his father's house straight into the arms of los Lobos, and from them, after a few smaller stints in juvie, and then local jails, the mission against the Treces and a long stay in the state pen. These were the best days Ramón had seen.

"What's the kid look like now?" Valdez had wheeled over to where Ramón's photos hung. He was taking a picture with his cell phone.

"Pinche fisgon! The fuck you think you're doing." Ramón abandoned his latest tamale and stormed over to him. He grabbed Valdez' chair with one hand and grabbed the phone with the other. Valdez threw the phone. Ramón dove and snatched it up, looked down at the camera app still running, then up.

Valdez had a gun trained on him. His finger was on the trigger and his face was sheet-white under his freckles.

Ramón stood slowly, the phone low at his side. He saw Valdez swallow, his eyes dart back and forth, fear and regret dancing behind them. "How dare you," Ramón growled.

"Hand the phone over. You go your way, I'll go mine, no hard feelings, guey," the kid said, his voice strained, his hand trembling, but his gun staring Ramón right in the eye.

"Fuck me if I ever let un pandillero impúbero order me around in my own house," Ramón growled. "How dare you. You come to my house. You take a picture of my son. And you don't show me the basic respect of telling me you have a weapon."

"I—my bad," the kid said, still training the gun on him. "Delete the picture. I shoulda asked first."

"You keep pointing that gun at my face, you're not a human being, understand? You're an enemy. You treated me like I was your enemy."

"Lo siento, Mr. Cordova. Sincerely."

"Put it away."

The kid lowered the gun, flipped up the safety, and tucked it back under his thigh, concealed by his loose-fitting shorts. He stared back up at Ramón, his lips white and pressed together, his breaths heaving deep. "How about that phone back."

Ramón looked down at the picture of his ex-girlfriend and his son, the familiar water spot distorting the bottom corner. The most precious thing he owned. He deleted it off the kid's phone, tossed it at the kid's lap. "Get the fuck out."

The kid grinned his sharp false grin and wheeled himself to the door. "Thanks for the interview," he said, struggling to open the front door from the wheel chair while watching Ramón over his shoulder. "Ey—What was it like?"

Ramón walked over, slow, and opened the door for him. Ignored the question.

"What was it like, to make it big?"

"Get the fuck out of my house."

The kid got the fuck out of his house. He rocked the wheelchair over the threshold, then, on the porch, he leaned over the arm and put the gun on the cement, then he rolled off the chair, pushed the chair down the steps, scooted himself down after it, retrieved his gun, scooted over to the chair, and hauled himself back up.

Well, that answered the question of how he'd made it onto Ramón's porch. Persistent little shit. Ramón shut the door on him, and watched through the peephole until the kid rolled out of sight down the street. He flipped the deadbolt, turned around, and shook the adrenaline out of his hands. Tamales. He'd barely started the batch. Make enough for work. Put the rest in the freezer. Take a dozen to Cecilia Palas and her four kids down the road.

He stared again at his spare house, the smell of fresh cornmeal and sawdust, the half-refurbished table, the cracked ceiling, the cobweb in the corner. Something bumped his ankle and he almost drew his own gun; it was the cat, back from wherever it had run off to, rubbing back and forth against his shin. He petted it with his shoe so as not to get cat hair on his hands and then in the tamales.

At his age, he should have married Maria long ago. His son, almost Valdez' age, should live with them both, and more children besides. He should have a work history, a reputation.

Well, a reputation he had. El Perro Rabioso. His reputation made Canelo's Auto and Body the last, the first, the only resort he had for a legitimate job, and even there, he had no respect, just fear. His mother was dead; his father and his son and his son's mother wanted nothing to do with him. Same with his homies: dead, calmado or quit, or bent on dragging him back into the fold dead or alive. Los Maravilla Lobos and the Black Hand that puppeteered them had taken everything of value Ramón had ever had.

And this stupid kid wanted to hear about his "glory days."

* * *

He finished the batch of tamales and ate them with the jalisco, and later some chile verde, over the next week. He kept his head down, tried not to scare his coworkers more than they deserved, bit back his temper, punched an emissary from Maravilla Catorce in an alley on the way to his bus stop. He missed his motorcycle.

On Thursday night, Cecilia's two oldest kids banged on his door and he abandoned his half-varnished coffee table to walk down the street, pistol tucked into the back of his pants in case of Lobos or Catorces and beer in hand to stop himself from strangling Cecilia's ex-boyfriend. After a very long, soft, repetitive conversation with the boyfriend that would've given Ramón's parole officer concerns for his community by the time the drunken idiot finally tucked tail and drove home, Ramón returned to find the varnish had dried on half the coffee table and it would either need to be completely sanded again or re-stained from the nice honey-maple he'd picked to something like dark walnut to cover the streaks. Friday, he worked. Saturday, he worked. Sunday, he went to church, took mass. The taste of the wafer took him right back to the penitentiary: it was the same tasteless cracker used by the priest who visited the prison chapel.

He thought about the kid.

"What was it like, to make it big?"

Such a deafening gulf of ignorance.

He pictured his son, his gap-toothed face burned in his brain, just as it was when he'd been staring too long at the worn picture. Unchanging, laughing. But his son was fifteen, maybe sixteen, wherever he was. Who would tell his son not to follow in his footsteps and become a hatchetman for the Black Hand? The kids here learned from what they saw, just like he had. They saw clean new clothes, new cars in good repair, families rising out of debt, new toys for the little ones. They saw things they thought were worth killing and dying for, and others, outsiders, warning them away from these riches. Who would tell them to count their blessings, keep their heads down, and work honestly, when as far as they could see, honesty had so little reward?

He called Hillrock High, left a message to pass on to the student paper: Ramón Cordova, and his phone number. Permission to call back.

He got a call from Martin Valdez Monday night. The kid wasted no time. "You got my word, Mr. Cordova, nobody knows I talked to you, nobody knows I went to your house. My lips are sealed, como una tumba, patrón. Like it never happened."

Ramón rolled his eyes. "No mames, pandillerito."

"Verdad! No hay mamada!"

"That's not why I reached out. You asked for an interview, and I got time to spare for kids like you. Who want to know about the life."

A silence on the line as the kid thought better of putting his hackles up at being called "kid." "Thank-you, Mr. Cordova."

"Ask your questions. You have, eh...twenty minutes."

There was a long pause. A shuffle, a clunk. Then the kid said, "Your place. Never seen better days?"

Ramón had to cast his mind back to figure out what he meant. "No. No, it hasn't. I haven't. This is my first place of my own. Solitary doesn't count.

"My time is my own. I can do whatever I want with it. Food, rent, work. I fix things up on the side. I can finally get right with God, so I go to mass. The only thing I have to do is meet my parole officer, and every meeting is a step toward finally getting free. Free in the eyes of the law, because I'll never truly be free. I'll never get back what the life took from me. But I can finally make a life of my own."

Silence from the kid. Then, "What do you want from life now?"

I want to see my son. Ramón said, "To rejoin society. To pay back what I took."

"Guilt? Make amends? That's it?"

"Some people, you can't make amends to. Your actions, God's will, the time on the inside—they're gone. If I could beg forgiveness from everyone I've wronged—well, I can't. So I do what I can."

"Feels good?"

"Makes me feel like a man instead of a bitch." He lowered the phone briefly, petting the cat with his free hand. He took a sip of beer. "Kid, you asked about the Hillrock Treces. I know that's why you tracked me down. The rumors.

"I'm not gonna tell you the whole story. I'm not a snitch and I'm not a fool. What I will tell you, I'd advise you not put it in your paper because it would put a target on your school, and I hope you know better than to do that. Correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"It wasn't a beef. Between los Lobos y los Treces, it wasn't revenge. The drive-by at the shrine I told you about had nothing to do with what happened to the Treces. No one person could have done that, no one gang could have wiped out an entire cliqua.

"It was an order from Tehachapi. I met the man who gave that order, during my stay. He told me, if he wanted, he could have made the Lobos and the Treces shake hands over a drink, go into business together. But, he told me, the Treces had to go. They'd been cheating on their taxes.

"See, that's what the life is really about. It's not about business, or el varrio, or brotherhood; por y sobre la verga—all bullshit. It's all about power, and no matter how powerful you think you are, you're always under the boot of someone stronger, some jefe sitting in a cell in Tehachapi with a life sentence. So it wasn't because the Treces were murdering cowards who sprayed bullets at Marco's mourners because his shrine was on their turf. It was because that jefe wasn't getting his cut of their revenue, and he was mad. So he gave his blessing on all the gangs in East LA who wanted a piece of the Treces, and because East LA is always at war, four different gangs answered his call.

"That's how it goes. The wars, the fighting for turf, the dealing, none of it's for you. It's to keep you hungry and angry and scared. Keeps you ready to shoot when the jefe says fire, so he can use your anger to keep all the other cliquas in line. Marco and his wife never got justice from what happened in '05. But el jefe, next year, he got his fucking taxes."

Ramón kept his hand deliberately open, rigid with gentleness, as he petted the cat. The cat made an angry noise and bumped its chin hard on his hand, so hard one tooth scraped along his palm.

"I had to keep my mouth shut while he talked about Marco's death, and what he'd used—his men to do, here in Hillrock. I had to let him touch me. El Perro Rabioso. Puta Rabiosa.

"So that's what it feels like when you've made it, Valdez. You feel like the lowest puta to ever drag her tits along the ground."

The cat licked his thumb, then bit him. He jerked his hand away, and it rolled over on his lap, grabbing for his hand with its claws. He looked down and resumed petting it, very carefully.

"You spend time in Juvie?" he asked.

"Sure," the kid said, as though Ramón had been asking about his job qualifications.

"They make you fight?"

The kid snorted. "Make me. Tried to stop me. I ruled that place—"

"All bullshit," Ramón said. "Why do you think you had to fight? Fighting doesn't just weed out the soldiers from the weaklings, fighting drives you into the gang. Gives you something to run away from. And for what? So some sixty-year-old bastard walled up in Tehachapi gets a soldier to collect taxes for him. And if you try to get out—you'd be lucky to end up in a chair. There's no way out."

"Why did you get out?" the kid asked, after a pause. His tone was dubious.

"Didn't you hear me? There's no way out. I'm waiting for a death sentence," Ramón said, exasperated. "But why did I get out? Because they didn't deserve me. They used me. They took everything from me, my freedom, my family, my honor, and gave me nothing for it. But when I die, I'll die on my feet, fighting for my own conscience, like a man."

"So you work, cook, and fix furniture," the kid said.

"It's my life," Ramón said. "It's finally my life. So I do what I want and what I believe in, when I can."

"I respect that," the kid said, magnanimously. "Mind if I quote that?"

Ramón gave the cat one last stroke, looked down, and noticed a strange wild light in its eyes, drool streaming down its chin. He stopped petting and ignored the cat's pleading for more. The next stroke, the little devil would really bite him. "Go ahead, kid. It's all I have."


	2. Word On The Street

"Son, get outta my face with that shit," the bearded man snarled, and Guero stuffed his pill vial back in his shorts, cheeks burning.

Can't walk. Can't get a job. Can't even sell Percocet to homeless vets. "Fuck you for your service," he sneered, and backed his chair down the aisles of the shelter.

It was seven in the morning. He was meant to be helping serve breakfast, organize food donations, stuff that worked better when you could lean across the counter or reach high shelves. The shelter supervisor had Guero take roll and hand people their bags back out of lock-up, staring over his shoulder the entire time, but that was a half-an-hour's task and Guero managed to beg off of the bag-handling by pretending to be unable to reach across the table or lift more than five pounds. He was pretending. He was.

In the end he got free to wander the aisles between the tables where the men were eating breakfast, his phone on his lap, recording. He was ostensibly collecting interviews for a human-interest article for the school paper. Pulitzer-shit. That's how you get the big scholarship money: good character (his juvie record had just been sealed) and strong extracurriculars (he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with, now that he couldn't keep up with his men anymore). But while he asked for these saps' life stories (accountant, can't make rent; currently working two jobs, can't make rent; got divorced and laid off, can't make rent; just found Jesus and got out of jail, can't make rent; gee, it's almost like playing by the rules don't get you nowhere) he also kept an ear out for what he really wanted.

"You ever see this new drug going around? Comes in a blue capsule, white crystalline powder, smells like laundry soap—kinda like PCP and steroids mixed up?"

The man he'd cornered squinted at him. He had two dark moles at the corner of his left eye, and slight epicanthic folds. He had access to laundry somewhere. Smelled like shoe polish. Probably worked as a waiter, maybe even a "white collar" job. You wouldn't think he'd have an ear on the street, but there was more harm in not asking. "What, you mean like what those Blue Crew kids were hopped up on?" the man demanded.

Guero's heart jumped. "Yeah, that shit! I'm doing an article, hazards of the street, designer drugs, that kinda thing. Gonzo journalism, you know. You ever see that? You ever see anybody on it?"

"Not since last year, thank God," Guero's subject replied. "That was fuckin' terrifying, 'scuse me. Those guys were huge. Crazy. One of those kids, I knew him, he'd come paint sometimes in one of those old stores, and after the gang broke up, it was all he could talk about, where's Doctor Zero and where could he get more of those pills...really messed him up."

"How about pink pills?" Guero asked, low. "I heard there's these other capsules, pink. Same doctor. You ever hear about those?"

"Shit, no. Kid, my mind is the only thing I got left. I'm not throwing that away on pills. I respect what you're trying to do, but I can't help you."

He sighed. He'd keep trying. "Mind telling me how you wound up here, then? And could I get a picture? I'll make you look good. Get your best angle."

Guero got his standard interview (moved out from Vegas, now can't move back), thanked the man, and kept moving down the aisles.

He spotted a man with two tear-drop tats who wore fingerless gloves to eat with. Jackpot. Probably hiding some very incriminating knuckle tats; a lot of the Killaz and Pyros inked their hands, and not with love/hate or playing card pips. "Respect," Guero said, rolling up to him. He raised his arms over his head and stretched, so the Colt 1911 inked on his inner arm showed. The man watched him with narrowed eyes. "Martin Valdez, reporter for the Hillrock Buzzard. No names, no photos, I promise. You look like a dude who's seen some shit."

"We've all seen shit," the man replied in Spanish, and Guero switched over to match.

"Buzzard's not your average student paper," Guero said. "Buzzard's about safety. Real events. The ears and eyes of the people. That's why I keep pounding the street, you know—rolling the street. So dish, what's happening out there? Where we all live?"

The man sighed, looked at Guero over his paper coffee cup. "Everyone knows I calmed down," he said. "I quit. I've been lucky so far, but one of these days, kid, I'm going to wake up with my head kicked in, when some newbie like you wants to prove he's a real cold-blooded soldier. It's not a game."

"No, no," Guero agreed hastily. "Not a game." He held up his phone, shut off the recording. "See? I respect your privacy. Paper's in English, anyway. I'll translate, paraphrase. I can make you sound like a nineteenth-century railroad baron."

The man chuckled. "How 'bout King Arthur. Can you make me talk like King Arthur?"

"Regal as shit, dude," Guero said. "So. What's going on out there?"

A heavy sigh. "_Weird_ shit, kid. Just. Ever since last year, the city's been standing on its head. Blue Crew wiped all the gangs off the map and then collapsed in a month. Now everybody who's left is finally feeling their oats enough to start staking out territory again. Maybe they'll set down lines and get back to business, except now we got our local Legend, driving around every other night breaking everybody's legs with a crowbar. Robot busts up one gang, their neighbors make a move while half of them are in the hospital, and then the Robot busts up that gang...that's settled down, some, this last month. The big bosses up in San Quentin probably told everybody to keep their heads down until they get a way to take it out. And I _don't_ want to see what they come up with, kid, I really don't.

"But the really weird shit. What's got me up at night." He leaned forward, and Guero pushed himself closer. "You hear the Pyros've been feuding with the Sawtelles all last month?"

Guero nodded. "Sawtelles went banging on Birch Street, shot El Duro and his lady."

"Yeah. Well, the Sawtelles claim El Duro was walking around south of Olympic, like he owned it."

"That's deep in Sawtelle territory," Guero protested. "Like, even before Blue Crew. That's been Sawtelles' block forever, what was he smoking? No wonder they hit him."

"That's my thought. What was the man _thinking?_ He had a family. That was grade-school shit. That was _dumb_. But the Sawtelles swear up and down that he went there. In colors. So." He swirled his coffee and knocked it back. "Don't know what'd possess a man like Duro to do that."

_How 'bout possession,_ Guero wondered. Aloud, he said, "Well maybe he _was _smoking something."

"He wasn't into that shit, though," the man said. He stared at his tray. "You hear about people on something new, though." He lowered his voice. "Maybe coulda—but not Duro."

"New, what new?" Guero demanded. "Is it a pill? A smoke? Who's slinging it?"

"Jesus, you talk like a cop or a dealer, kid," his subject hissed, and Guero lowered his head, abashed. _A cop. _

"Sorry," he said. "Just. The people gotta know, you know?"

"I've never seen it," the man murmured. "But sometimes, you see somebody on it. Someone you know. You say hey. They say hey back. But you get to talking to them, and in five seconds, you know—they're not _them._"

"They're tripping? Past lives, fursona sorta shit?"

"It's like nobody's home." His eyes went wide for a moment, haunted. "And they don't remember later. I asked Tommy, after I saw him like that. He didn't remember talking to me. Didn't remember what he took. Thought he'd just gone around like normal, but I saw him. He was him, but he wasn't."

"Where can I find Tommy? If I can trace this shit, find out who's selling it—people can't be wandering around East Los like zombies, you gotta keep your head on."

"Don't you go using this stuff, kid," the man admonished him, and Guero scoffed.

_This_ stuff? Zombie shit? Guero didn't want to throw his life away.

He wanted his life _back._

And whoever was selling this new shit, maybe, just maybe, they knew where he could get a blue pill.

* * *

"_Verily I saw my friend, a man I kennéd well, behaving passing strange, as though entranced or changéd."_

Mr. Wakeford dotted the line on Guero's second draft, raised his eyebrow. "That's an interesting choice of diction there."

"I'm protecting my source," Guero said. Last spring, he'd slugged Mr. Wakeford in the face. Now he was meeting with him during office hours after school. Probably because Wakeford knew Guero couldn't reach him to punch him again. Well, joke was on him; Guero kept a Glock in the seat of his chair.

"I'm not criticizing," Wakeford said. "I'm just...I find it amusing. I think your readers will find it amusing. And I'm impressed with your Elizabethan style."

"Oh, I got all kinds o'style," Guero said. "Is it fit for publication or what?"

"There's a few hiccups with grammar, and I've noted some words where I think you meant to say something else that sounds similar. That's easy enough to fix. Mainly, when you're writing news—"

"Who, what, when, where, why," Guero interrupted. "I get it. I'll re-do the first line. But I don't got the 'why' yet. This is just the facts. It's an ongoing story."

"You're going to keep digging?" Mr. Wakeford asked. "I applaud your commitment, but—"

Guero sneered. "I'm still safer in this hood than you."

"I don't mean to patronize. Please be careful."

"What for?"

Mr. Wakeford's dumb blue eyes went wide behind his coke-bottle lenses. "Mr. Valdez, you have a future. You've always had a future. And you have talent. In all your work—when you participated—you impressed me with your attention to detail and your use of facts to support your opinions. Your work on this paper is objectively excellent. I could see you making a career in journalism."

"I wanna be a chemist," Guero countered. "Like, a bio-chemist."

"See? You could support yourself, help others, develop new medications—"

"Like, a chemist who designs drugs."

"Sure."

"Or—or a drone operator. Like for the CIA."

Mr. Wakeford sighed. "I'm sure you could be a great intelligence analyst."

"I wanna shoot rockets at people. Boom. You dead, motherfucker."

"I think, if you wanted to, you could do something that supports yourself and helps your community."

Guero scoffed. "What, and risk my disability check?" He took his rough draft back, stuffed it awkwardly into the bag hanging behind his backrest. "Thanks for the tips, man."

"You're welcome," Mr. Wakeford said.

Guero set his brakes as he reached the door so he could slam it behind him, then wheeled toward the library to work, watching up and down the hallway. He put his hand under the fleece blanket folded beneath his thighs, touched the handgrip of his gun. _Please be careful._ Like he ever got to stop.

* * *

The _Hillrock Buzzard_ that week had an article by Lisa O'Toole about rent-to-income ratios, and an article by Martin Valdez that included a map of gang conflict hot spots and all the rumors he'd collected about a new drug circulating.

Maps and gangs were a potentially explosive combination, but Guero didn't give a shit. Guero lived for danger. Guero wasn't afraid of anything.

Guero wanted a blue pill, or an early death.

Those months he'd spent with the Blüe Crüe last spring had been the greatest time in his life. Not just the pills. The pills made him unstoppable, powerful, but Doc Zabo only gave out pills when he called the men up for missions. What he missed were the dorms. Zabo's warehouse was full of cots and hammocks and lockers; if you had no place to go, you snagged a bed, stuffed your things in your locker, and you could sleep there. Guero had joined on early, he'd been a captain. None of the other soldiers bothered him aside from asking for favors. He'd lived at that warehouse. Got breakfast at a diner, kept his cash in his locker, washed his clothes with his laundromat allowance—there'd been whole weeks when he'd never had to go home.

With Zabo's pills, he could survive anything Hillrock Heights threw at him.

In Zabo's dorm, he could _want_ to survive.

Now he lived with his mother again. A rubber stopper for his door, his cash taped to the underside of his sock drawer. Sometimes she cooked for them. Sometimes he had to cook for her. Sometimes he pissed in bottles so as not to leave his room. She was kind after his injury, for maybe a week.

"Ain't right, the way she treats you," a boyfriend said to him once. "I'll talk to her. She's got a lot of stress, that's all. You'll see."

"She's a crazy bitch and you'll be gone in a month," Guero had said, and he'd been right.

Working on the _Buzzard_ had Guero riding the bus all over the city after school. Sharing his phone number, taping interviews, taking notes, dozing at the library, leaving the apartment before sunup. He sold his dwindling supply of Percocet a tablet at a time. Thought about growing a medical marijuana plant, all legal and shit, except his mom could never leave it alone. Maybe he could carry it with him everywhere, hook the planter to the back of his chair. A little plant buddy.

His old homie Hernandez suggested Guero join him and Julio at In N' Out one Saturday night. "Don't go acting sorry for me," Guero had snarled, and that had been the end of that.

So now Guero had the _Buzzard._ Mr. Wakeford, Lisa O'Toole, and sometimes this geek who stammered and made the formatting look good. It was fine. It was temporary. Maybe it'd get him a scholarship out of here. Better, maybe it'd get him a blue pill.

He found "Tommy." Tommy swore up and down that all he used was heroin. He didn't buy any of Guero's Percocets. He denied being on Broad Street when the ex-gangster from the shelter had said he'd met him. He didn't know anyone selling blue or pink pills.

His wife, though, Gina—she chuckled as she introduced herself like there was some joke Guero wasn't getting—she'd seen some guy Luca get kicked out of a gas station for stealing hot dogs, acting spaced out, talking strange. And then she'd seen Luca again the same night, completely lucid, claiming he'd been at work all day. Luca did data entry. Gina didn't know which company. Guero gave her his number and a copy of the Buzzard, like he tried to do for all his potential sources, so she'd know he was for real.

He took calls after school and during lunch period. Some people just wanted someone to whine to about how shit their life was, and Guero had to agree, life was generally shit. He didn't have time to listen to their life story, but he couldn't piss them off with a brush-off—what if they saw something useful later?—so he figured out how to disengage them. Usually "Phone's dying," or hanging up midsentence and turning his phone off for ten minutes. He sorted his contacts by neighborhood and used a pin map to document where people had been seen who might have been on the unknown drug.

In three weeks of working the Zombie story, he noticed some weird patterns.

None of his contacts had ever seen two people on the drug at the same time. Why not? Did it make you immediately wander far, far away from whoever you'd shared a puff with? Guero tried to avoid getting high solo, unless he was already barricaded in his room. But if this was the cool new thing, more people should be trying it out. None of his contacts had heard of anyone trying to push anything new, either. Guero didn't _think_ anyone thought he was an undercover cop, not after he'd sold them prescription painkillers, anyway, and if there was a new drug, he should be hearing about it.

Of course it might not be a new drug. Might be cough syrup. Might be salvia, or magic mushrooms. But the effects of this new stuff were weirdly specific: you'd wander around, steal food, repeat anything spoken to you, run when approached. And you'd never, ever remember anything about the trip. Or even buying the drug.

And when he put dates on the pins on his map, the sightings were grouped chronologically. Like whoever was selling the stuff sold it to one person at a time, slowly moving around East and South Central LA. Why not have a dealer in each neighborhood? And why deal exclusively to the homeless?

Maybe it wasn't being dealt so much as dosed. Maybe a date-rape drug. Except more than half the users were men, and none of them claimed to have even been robbed. Nobody had blank spots in their memory; they thought their day had been normal.

Maybe the witnesses were on drugs.

Maybe it wasn't drugs.

Luca worked data entry. Luca had been kicked out of a gas station for stuffing stolen food in his face like a wild animal, and Luca _still_ worked data entry. Guero texted him, under the table while he tried to memorize the blackboard in chemistry class. _Did you miss any days at work this month?_

Luca replied late at night, while Guero sat barricaded in the East LA Public Library with his newspapers and biochem books. (Another side project: track down any of Doc Zabo's old buddies. Anyone who could have known what made the pills work. Seemed the Doc hadn't been a real friendly type.) Luca said, _No absences. I checked. Major project that day. Stop asking. Wasn't me._

Guero visited the shelter again, early in the morning that Friday. "You hear this crazy rumor, something going around, stealing people's faces?" he asked a young man in a torn windbreaker.

The man threw his plastic fork at his reconstituted eggs. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "Yes, that's exactly what's happening!"

* * *

It turned out Guero had been asking the wrong questions. When he lead with the body-snatcher story, he got a lot more answers.

"Someone stole my bed. The dicks at the shelter said I was there that night."

"I woke up and someone who looked just like me was sitting in front of my face, staring at me."

"I know Tomas, right? Well, one time there was two of him. I said, Dude, did you fucking fly here? And he said no. And I said, I saw you at the other end of the block just now, and we ran and looked, and we saw this dude looked exactly like Tomas, just wandering in the road. Freaky as shit, man."

"I saw El Duro's ghost. It was the day after he'd died. He was just standing there at the bus stop. Never got on."

The witness who'd seen El Duro was a woman, thirty or forty, who'd lived in a camper trailer ever since her apartment had been torn down and renovated. Guero had been rolling up and down a street on one of the Sawtelles' blocks, fishing for interviews, when he'd knocked on her door. It was eight at night. One advantage of being stuck in a chair: no one was scared of him anymore.

"It's late, hon," she said, staring down at him from the narrow steps of her trailer. "Shouldn't you be getting home?"

"Got a few more hours to go." Guero shrugged. "Chasing my story, yanno, truth can't wait."

"You want a hot pocket?" she asked. "Wait there. I'll make you a hot pocket."

_Don't act fuckin' sorry for me,_ was on the tip of Guero's tongue, but he was starving. So he waited while she microwaved a hot pocket and got him a bottled water. Yay, a plastic bottle to piss in.

"Aren't you gonna say thank-you?" she demanded as he rolled away.

"I didn't ask for any food," Guero retorted.

"Come back any time, you little shit." She slammed the aluminum door. Guero's stomach knotted and he rolled faster.

* * *

Guero's current strategy of wandering up and down the streets after school talking to people and angling for a good price for his Percocets naturally weighted his interview pool toward the homeless, teens like him, and street-level dealers. For variety, he tried some bars. "I'm a reporter for the _Hillrock Buzzard_"didn't get him as far inside as a fake ID, but he didn't need to talk to the bartenders, he needed to talk to the bouncers. Bouncers would notice identical twins trying to get into the same establishment.

"There's a rumor going around of some 3-d printed face-mapping nanotech kids are using to sneak into clubs," Guero informed a door guard at a techno rave taking place inside a moldering warehouse. A line of emos and scene kids stretched around the corner, many obviously drunk, some covered in glitter. They glared at Guero suspiciously. Come to think of it, the guard might just be watching for undercover cops. "SHIELD cooked it up and now the law's using it, too," he added.

This got the guard's attention. "Where'd you hear this?"

"Hitting the street, yanno. Journalism. There's people seeing doubles. You hear how El Duro got hit? There was a double of him walking around after he died."

"I'll keep an eye out," said the guard, disturbed, and Guero gave him his number and a copy of the _Buzzard._

Guero published an article about the methods door guards and bouncers used to verify IDs, complete with a photo he'd taken of a bar's trophy box stuffed with fifty fakes of varying quality. If the _Buzzard_ cost money, they would have sold out.

Meanwhile, he kept stockpiling information and sorting through old interviews on the doppelganger story.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a much sexier story than New Zombie Amnesia Drug, but Body Snatchers was practically unprintable. Guero needed to be taken seriously as a student reporter. Nonetheless, the body snatchers were out there, blundering around, setting off gang feuds and getting people killed. It was just a matter of time before they cloned Papi Loco or somebody, wandered west of I-5, and started a full-scale war between East Los and South Central.

They needed to be stopped.

Somehow, Body Snatchers had changed from a possible lead on Doc Zabo's drugs, to a possible junior journalism prize, to a problem in his neighborhood Guero needed solved.

* * *

"It's like that horror movie, _The Thing_," said a shaky guy in a stained shearling coat. Girl? Guy? Called 'emself Jenny. Whatever, he anonymized all his sources. Guero just hoped no one he knew saw him talking to this person. "Maybe Robot Racer'll find it and light it up."

"Man, _fuck_ that asshole," Guero snapped. "He don't care about people, he's just on a power trip. We gotta take care of this ourselves."

"What? How?"

Guero shrugged. "Anyone try shooting 'em?"

"But what if it's a robot, or a hologram, or, or what if it can't die—"

"I don't gotta think of everything, fool. You see one. Anybody sees one. You call me. They've never attacked anybody; we just gotta get close, figure out what it is, and then get rid of it."

* * *

Next time Guero camped out at the library until close, he got online for some ideas on what this John Carpenter thing might be. He expected to find a lot of bogus conspiracy theories. What he found instead were way, way more _genuine_ conspiracies than he'd ever imagined.

CIA dosing people with hallucinogens? True.

Robot clones? SHIELD tech. But why test out hyper-realistic robots but give them an AI dumber than the average smartphone? And robots don't need to eat.

Self-replicating robots? Ultron.

Mission-Impossible face masks? SHIELD again. But why steal hot dogs out of a gas station? Why impersonate homeless people?

Aliens? Lots and lots of message-boards about lizard people, half of them talking about Jewish humans and the other half talking about actual shapeshifting alien lizards. But, again, why so dumb? Was it, like, a lizard with brain damage?

How incredibly useless and annoying.

A robot, you could wipe its hard drive with a rare earth magnet. You could buy a magnet with a hundred-pound pull for twenty bucks, plus shipping. But a quick search after that showed that it probably wouldn't even work: apply sledgehammer, repeat, was the computer guy's recommendation.

Guero could apply bullet, repeat. Repeat ten more times. And then, like…sand? Sand was really bad for machines. Throw sand on it once he'd punched it full of holes. Might slow it down.

It might not even mean any harm. Probably wasn't even able to understand the rules for living around here. But that didn't matter. It had to go.

From the library, Guero sent a text out to his contacts.

_Times up for this face-stealing freakshow. East Side rolls hard. You see it you catch it you call me ill blow its head off. (gun) (gun) rucklroad hardboys till I (skull)_

Guero rubbed at the coffin tattooed on his forearm, a spot in the middle where it had peeled and scabbed and the color had faded. Even if the body-snatcher did turn hostile, it wouldn't be a bad way to go.

Better to be ripped limb from limb by an angry robot at eighteen than dead in an alley with a syringe in his arm at twenty-eight.

Within minutes, he was flooded with incredulous texts, some having the temerity to suggest that he was _lucky_ to have broken his back and been forced to quit gang-banging, and he shut his phone off for a couple hours after that.

* * *

Guero completed an article on crack cocaine and its impact on society, which the school refused to publish, and which landed him in the school mental health counselor's office to stare at the wall for an hour. Mr. Wakefield gave him credit for the article anyway. "I'm too real for these fools," Guero hissed as he rolled to the library to download more newspaper articles about Doc Zabo's activities in New York. "Next time I'll do society shit. Prom fashion. Upcoming quinceaneras." No one was nearby to laugh at his jokes.

He missed Hernando. He even missed Julio, the dweeb.

He'd met enough people, talked to enough people, and visited the shelter often enough that now he was getting reports on the body-snatcher right from the streets, without him having to take the bus anywhere. It still hadn't attacked anyone yet. Just wandered around, parroted people's sentences. Started fights it would never have to finish.

He got a call at nine-twenty on a Tuesday night, riding the bus after the city library closed. Usually he stayed on the line for its whole circuit, about two hours, killing time until his mom might be in bed and he could go home. Used to be, he'd post up with his men. Drink, smoke, or go looking for strange cars, valuables, something to steal, something to sell. Now it was just him. Just Guero. Nobody to watch his back. Can't run, can't climb, can't hide.

His phone buzzed and he picked it up. _Marco Hnndz Broad St_ calling. Hit accept. Marco was breathless, babbling. "Aay! Fuckin' bugs! Kid, I saw it, I woke up, it had my fuckin' face, vato! My face, right in front of me! I fuckin' chased that thing, I chased it three blocks, right to that little park with the swings, I tackled that thing like a fuckin' linebacker, _I had my hands on it,_ fuckin', _melted,_ homes, it's not a robot, it's _ants_ or somethin', _beetles,_ it burrowed into the ground and I'm posted up next to it with Lupo, I'm at that little park next to the Texaco, on Pine and Javier, you know, you say you can kill it? How do we kill it?"

"What?" Guero snapped. "You're babbling, man. Is the thing there? Where is it?"

"It went under the ground!" Marco yelled. "Like ants!"

"It's ants?"

"I dunno, like army ants, like those ants that build bridges outta themselves on the Nature channel!"

Guero blinked. "Let me talk to Lupo."

Rustling as the phone was passed over. A new voice, slurred, slower. "You the kid from the paper?"

_The kid from the paper._ "Fuck," Guero hissed. An old lady on the bench seat next to the wheelchair berth scowled at him, and he scowled back. "Yeah, Martin Valdez, _Hillrock Buzzard._ Call me Guero. I been following this body-snatcher for a month. You see it?"

"I dunno," Lupo said, and Guero rolled his eyes. "I'll tell you what I saw. I saw Marco chasing this dude. So I get up and follow him. I lose Marco. I find him again at the park. He's lying down next to this big anthill looking like an angel came down just to wave his dick at him. I didn't see no ants, I didn't see no beetles."

"Did the dude he was chasing look like Marco?" Guero demanded.

"Yeah," Lupo allowed.

"Dress like Marco?"

"Yeah."

"You see any clothes on the ground?"

"No."

"This anthill," Guero said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "It got any ants comin' outta it?"

"It's dark, the ants're sleepin'," Lupo said.

"So dig into it. If these are regular ants, I'm not comin' over there."

"Man, I don't wanna get bit," Lupo protested, and Marco, far away from the phone, yelled, "_Touch_ that thing? _Fuck_ no!"

"Just _dig into it!_" Guero snarled. "Christ! I known twelve-year-olds with more huevos than you pussies!"

"You don't gotta be mean about it," Lupo complained, and Guero heard more rustling. Shuffling. A shriek.

"What? What?" he demanded. "Pic! Send a pic!"

"It's gone, it's gone deeper," Marco yelled, and Lupo added, "That ain't ants, man, that ain't ants! Ho-shit, Ho-shit that's freaky!"

"Did you get a pic?"

Lupo answered. "No, it's gone. It's still here, but it's gone. I ain't kicking that thing again. Now what do we do?"

"Now we kill it," Guero said. He knew this. He'd _read_ this. _Lenningen Versus The Ants._ "We pour oil around it and then we light it on fire."

Marco grabbed the phone. "Where'm I supposed to get a can of gas, kid? Shit's expensive."

"Just take it!" Guero snapped. "Suck it out with a tube, put it in bottles! I gotta think of everything here? Mierda! Sit tight, I'll be there in..." He consulted a map, a time table. "Bout an hour and a half. I been chasing this thing so long, I want pics."

Twenty furtively-crossed blocks and one bus change later, Guero found his contact Marco crouched on the lawn of a play-park, a taller man standing beside him. A big sandy pimple, about a foot tall and three feet wide, rose out of the turf. "Alright, fools, you pour the fuel yet?"

The big guy, Lupo, stared at Guero like he was speaking Martian. Guero was about to repeat himself, slower, when Lupo said, "I don't steal. I don't have a tube. We gotta do something else."

"Fuck this altarboy shit, vatos!" Guero spat. "We got face-stealing bugs!" He smacked his armrest in frustration. "Spot me forty bucks."

"I need that for my phone plan," Lupo protested.

"I got seventeen," Marco said. Lupo coughed up another eight dollars, and Guero covered the rest.

"Dunno when I'm gonna eat tomorrow," Marco said. "Payday's not 'till Monday, this ain't in the budget."

"You know anyone looking for Percocet?" Guero grumbled. This wasn't in his budget, either.

"Man, _nobody's_ buying that shit right now, there was a buncha pills going around, half the time it didn't work and the other half you fuckin' died. Everybody's doin' heroin. Cheaper."

Guero's gut dropped. "But I got—this the real shit, fool! A doctor had me get it from a pharmacy and everything! It's for my back!"

"Dunno what to tell you, kid."

"Man, _fuck _this town."

"No argument there."

Guero and Lupo went to the Texaco and got a gas can, filled it with diesel. "Don't explode so bad," Lupo said. Lupo shifted the can onto his shoulder as they walked back to the park.

"Stomp around it first, in case it moved," Guero told him and Marco. "If it tunneled away, we're out thirty-seven bucks."

They stomped. Gingerly, at first, and then harder. The ground was packed solid.

"Okay, pour," Guero said. "Make a circle. Not too wide, we only got three gallons." Lupo traced the edge of the dirt-mound in diesel fuel, pouring steadily. It disappeared into the earth almost as quick as he poured it. "Save a little to dump down the middle, after."

As Lupo completed three-fourths of the ring, Guero heard a crackling hiss from under the ground.

"Whoa, you hear that? Sounds like bacon frying," Marco said.

Lupo's hands shook, and the line of diesel fuel got shakier. He finished the circle. "I got a lighter."

"Wait, wait," Guero said. He pulled out his phone. "Getting louder."

"Whatcha doing, kid? Let's burn this thing," Marco pleaded.

"I been chasing this all month, I told you," Guero snapped. "I want video." He pushed himself closer, held the phone low to the ground to capture the crackling noise. The dirt began to heave. Marco fussed in the background, "Kid, get back," but Guero ignored him: this thing really didn't like being oily. It was coming up. After all this time, talking to dipshit after dipshit, finally he would have proof he wasn't just chasing some bullshit urban legend. He adjusted the zoom on his phone, leaned sideways in his chair to reach over the anthill. The heaving sand shifted, and a flood of humming, multicolored flecks trickled into the light of the street lamps. "This ain't ants," Guero breathed. "And it ain't beetles."

The mass of tiny bodies winked and rippled with spots and bands of color. It raised itself into a mound as the earth collapsed beneath it: about the size of four basketballs, churning and crawling over itself to get away from the diesel fuel. Guero waved his phone over and across the space, capturing different lights and angles as it formed shifting arches and spires of itself. How to prove this wasn't CGI? He reached for his bag, dug out a half-depleted water bottle, unscrewed it with his teeth as he filmed with his other hand. Dumped out the water and jabbed at the swarm with the open end. Got the lip of it coated in bugs, shook them off, a few were stuck inside. He yanked it back, set his phone on his lap, capped the bottle. Filmed the insects inside, tilting the bottle this way and that to get rid of the glare. He squinted at them. Weird fuckers. Not shiny like ants or beetles. Almost like maggots with legs, but as small as the little red mites infesting the sidewalks. He only had a dozen or so. Separated from the main mass, he couldn't see their colors. They milled around inside the plastic bottle just like normal ants, but they weren't. Wrong number of parts.

Guero stuffed the bottle safely into his bag, reached his phone back over the mass to keep filming. It churned more and more vigorously, flashing bright stripes of yellow and purple. Signals. Emotions. Intelligence. "This is some X-Files shit," he breathed, checking the angle on his screen. He'd put up the footage on the school website. Take the bugs in the bottle down to the lab with the microscopes. This, _this_ was a story. Forget selling Percocet. This would get him on national TV.

What if CNN tried to talk to his mom?

Guero's hand dipped. The color-changing swarm of not-insects spiked up under it, wrapped around his phone, his arm, made a bridge out of itself and swarmed over his body. He screamed. Shut his mouth and eyes, plugged his nose with his free hand. The bugs were everywhere, and they were _heavy,_ they squeezed on him, brushed through all the hairs on his arm, over his body, under his clothes. His ears roared with the impacts of tiny feet. They were using him to climb over the diesel fuel to get to safety.

_Not today, fuckers._ Guero flung himself sideways out of his chair, into the ring of diesel. Tipped over into the dirt heap. His lungs burned from holding his breath. The bugs were wrapped all over him, humming and tickling, pressing him into the dirt, and all at once the pressure lifted, the bugs retreated, and Guero was being rolled over the sand by strong hands.

He opened his eyes and crawled on his elbows a little distance, enough to straighten out his legs so he could roll onto his back. "Thanks, homes. Let's light 'em up!"

"Thanks, homes," said a strange voice beside him, and Guero pushed himself up and looked into his own face.

"Fucker!" he said, swinging a punch. He couldn't keep himself upright and collapsed back into the dirt. "Get it away! Lupo! Get that thing away from me, what the fuck!" He propped himself onto his elbows and dragged himself backward over the grass. The mound of dirt was beside them. Guero's clone lay on its side, staring at him. It poked curiously at its own legs. They looked just as useless as Guero's. "Dump the fuel on it, light it up, vatos!"

Marco carried Guero's chair over to him and Lupo reached down to grab his arms. Guero batted him away and hauled himself up, lifted his feet onto the rests with his hands.

The clone—the swarm—watched him, its expression neutral, eyes wide. Guero stared down at himself. His long nose, his red scar at the corner of his mouth. His tats. "Light it up," it said, in the same voice Guero heard whenever he listened to his taped interviews.

"Kid, I think it was trying to help you," Marco said. "It dragged you right over the diesel fuel. Looked like it hurt it. I think it thought it was hurting you, too."

"It stole my fucking face!" Guero shrieked. "Lookit that freaky shit! That stupid face! Tell me that didn't scare the shit outta you, Marco, light it up! Light it the fuck up!"

"Fuck-up!" cheered the clone.

Marco reached for the gas can, then shook his head vigorously. Lupo held up his hands. "I mean, yeah, it gave me a scare when it was me. But now it's—I can't kill it when it's you, kid. I don't think it means any harm. It's like a child or an animal or something. Look at it, it's worried about you."

"Stop calling me kid," Guero snarled. The clone began to drag itself over the grass toward him, and Guero backed away. "Why don't it body-snatch somebody with working legs," he growled. "Dumbshit."

"Maybe it can't remember who it's been," Marco suggested, watching the clone struggle.

"Hey," Lupo said. "We caught it. And we didn't have to shoot anybody."

"Get my piece," Guero demanded, pointing to his Glock lying in the dirt pile. "My piece and my phone." Lupo retrieved the phone and picked the gun up gingerly by the barrel, and Guero blew the dirt off and tucked the phone in his pocket, the gun under his thigh. "Well, we still gotta get rid of it. We scare it, it digs back into the dirt and we gotta buy more gas. We can't let it run around here."

"Give it a bus ticket," Lupo suggested.

"No," Guero growled. "Cause what if it never gets off the bus. Just rides the line and gets off right where it got on. No, we gotta..." He groaned. "We gotta drive it out and dump it somewhere."

"Whose car?"

"I know a guy," Guero said, pulling out his phone. He stared at it for a long minute, then grunted to himself and called Reyes.

Reyes picked up on the second ring. "Who is this?" Engine noise in the background.

"This is the guy whose back you broke," Guero hissed. "You owe me a favor."

About thirty seconds of engine noise. Then, "No."

"Reyes!"

"No!" Reyes yelled. "No, I'm not—can't talk, busy. Answer's no, Guero. Your decision to run with Zabo's crew. I'm working." And then he hung up.

"Fuck," Guero said, staring at his phone.

"Some guy broke your back?" Marco asked, concerned. "What'd he do, hit you with his car?"

"Threw me off a bridge," Guero muttered. "Fucker."

"No kidding. He coulda killed you."

Guero nodded. "He coulda killed a lot of people."

"You tell anybody?"

"Yeah, nobody cares." He scowled at the copy of himself that stared up from the grass.

"Nobody cares," it said with a mournful expression, and reached toward him. Guero shoved its hand away. It grinned at the brief contact.

"Mierda," he muttered. He got his phone again and ordered a rideshare. Hoped someone would pick up.

It was ten minutes before someone accepted his request.

_Eliot will arrive in 17-22 minutes in a 2010 Dodge Charger_, the app said, and Guero blinked down at his phone a moment before he burst out laughing. "Eliot" was the fake name Reyes used to drive for Uber.

Reyes arrived twenty-two minutes later, in a big black Charger that was _not_ a 2010 model.

They'd wrapped the fake Guero in the fleece blanket he kept on the seat of his wheelchair—he kept it with him to boost himself higher in the seat, help conceal his gun, and also in case he got cold. He got cold a lot with two dead legs. Guero's gun was in his bag, on his lap.

Lupo waved the car over to the park, where it stopped at the curb. Reyes got out, leaving the motor running, and walked over to them. He was in skinny jeans and that dumb striped leather jacket he was so proud of. His hair was so full of gel it stood up like a push-broom on top of his head. He stomped toward them. Reyes was short, but he walked like he was six foot five. Like he could bull through any obstacle in front of him. Which Guero supposed was true, with him being a Ghost Rider and all.

"I whistle you up on my app, you come running," Guero gloated. "Bet the carnals would throw a couple G's my way for putting 'em onto that."

Reyes stopped short. Something glinted on his forehead as he cocked his head. "What do you want?"

"Want you to take my buddy here home. I'll pay for him." Beside him, Lupo stooped and picked the fake Guero up in his arms, keeping the blanket pulled over its head. "He's real drunk."

"Where's he live?"

Guero smirked. "Hollywood."

Reyes squinted at him. Like he was anyone to talk about bullshit stories. "Where in Hollywood?"

_Shit._ "None of your damn business," Guero said.

Reyes raised one bushy eyebrow. "I need an address. You want me to drive this guy somewhere on your passenger account, that's already against the rules. I'm not dumping some helpless drunk on the street."

"Yeah, I can see the light of heaven shining out your ass," Guero growled. "What, you gonna drive off now? Leave him with us?"

Silence from Reyes. His feet shifted in the dry grass.

"What'ya think I'll do to him, Reyes? Take his phone, take his credit cards. Maybe I'll, like, drive over his fingers real good. Come on, Ghostie. Play hero."

"Why's he in that blanket?" Reyes demanded. He stomped over toward Lupo.

Marco got between them, yelled, "Don't you hurt him! Don't!"

Reyes ducked under his arm. Lupo couldn't run with the weight and burden of the double in his arms, and Reyes grabbed the blanket. "Guero!" he yelled, and whirled on them. He had the park lights behind him, and the streetlights were dim, and Guero swore he saw one of his eyes glow like hot metal. From the curb, Reyes monster of a car revved and whined. "What'd you assholes do to him? Who are you?"

"I didn't do nothing," Guero snapped. "Don't act like you care, you fucker. That thing stole my face and we gotta get rid of it."

"_Thing?_" Reyes demanded, his voice shrill and distorted.

"I don't know!" Ghost Rider or not, Reyes was as self-righteous as ever. "It's fuckin' alien X-Files bugs! Look at me, _I'm _Guero. _That_ is not me!"

"Me!" agreed the thing in Lupo's arms, and Guero shuddered. Reyes stared at it.

"Tell it something sappy," Guero said.

Reyes crept closer, and Lupo let him. The fake Guero pressed itself back against Lupo's chest, and Marco warned him, "Don't scare it, or it'll dissolve again."

Softly, Guero heard Reyes tell it, "Don't worry. I'm gonna get you somewhere safe."

"Safe, get you," the clone echoed, repeating Robbie's words in the exact same pitch and inflection, like a tape recorder. It reached its hand out to him, and Reyes took it.

"Told you," Guero called. "It's like a parrot. It doesn't know how to live around here. We're not killing it, so we got to move it somewhere it can't get anybody else killed."

"Hollywood," Reyes said.

"Unless you got any better ideas."

"I...no."

They got Guero loaded into the car, in the back bench seat, to navigate. Find a nice patch of dirt to release the swarm into. The clone sat in the front seat, where it tried to touch everything Reyes touched and generally made driving across the city a chore and a half. Reyes played terrible screaming music. Guero browsed on his phone and found the address of a public park. Reyes pulled up to the curb, checked for cops, and carried the fake Guero gently out to the lawn.

"Grab the blanket," Guero demanded. "It's mine."

Reyes gently untangled the blanket from the swarm of sentient bugs. "We just leave him here?"

"It's not a person," Guero reminded him, and he pulled out his Glock and fired over the fake's head.

The fake Guero's eyes went wide with betrayal before it disintegrated into a flowing granular mass of color-changing silverfish. Reyes snarled, the _car_ growled and shook all around Guero, and, oh, shit, he was going to die, he was eighteen and he was about to die. He clutched his gun, aimed at Reyes' forehead, at the shining metal just pressing through the skin—

The car quieted again, and Reyes stood there, human, breathing very hard. Slowly, Guero lowered his Glock and tucked it back into his bag. Reyes got back in the car. Suddenly the interior stank of exhaust fumes—Reyes' breath. Jesus. He was a freak. Bullets might not do anything to him.

"What was that?" Reyes demanded.

Guero shrugged.

"What's it do—does it eat people?"

"Not as far as anyone says. I got eleven people who saw it. Mostly it just makes you look bad. Been wandering around East Los and South Central for at least a month. Hey, crack a window, this car stinks."

Reyes rolled both windows halfway down. He only used his hands for one of them. "So you tracked it down."

Guero scoffed. "I'm a reporter," he said. "Ain't like it's hard."


End file.
